Growing up in Washington, D.C., Sonya Clark lived across the street from the home of the ambassador of Dahomey, a small sliver of a West African nation now known as the Republic of Benin. It was a large family with 14 children, which Clark describes as “very warm and wonderful.” She loved to go over there and play.

“Invariably, I would come back with the most elaborate hairstyles,” she recalls fondly. “I was just 5 or 6, and here I was with my hair all done up. The older girls would do it. You know, when you're that age, high school girls are like goddesses.”

Later, in college at the Art Institute of Chicago studying textile art, Clark came to the realization that hair was probably the first material used in weaving.

“I got to thinking about what the first textile art form was, and that led me to hairdressing,” she says. “Hair is the first textile humankind used in decorative and functional ways.

“So who knows if all this came to me in some college classroom, or if it goes much farther back to a much younger age.”

Clark, who sometimes uses her own hair in her art, which ranges from sculpture to photography to wall weavings, has a survey of several years of work on view at the Southwest School of Art through Feb. 12.

“I was trained as a textile artist, so I'm interested in the way hairdressing and textiles are really fused into one technical process,” Clark says. “I don't see much difference between weaving and cornrowing hair. Both are manipulations of fibers toward an aesthetic or functional means.”

Works in Clark's solo show include the intimate “Heritage Pearls,” a strand of “pearls” of the artist's hair in a jewelry case, and a monumental portrait of pioneering hair products magnate Madam C.J. Walker, a tapestry made with interwoven black, plastic combs, the teeth becoming the warp and weft.

“Black is beautiful — she was the one who laid the foundation for that,” says Clark, who earned her master's degree from the Cranbook Academy of Art and is chairwoman of the department of craft/material studies at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, one of the top textiles programs in the country.

Clark's work, which she has exhibited in more than 250 galleries and museums all over the world, is about identity, both individual and collective, and her American heritage. The daughter of a psychiatrist from Trinidad and a nurse from Jamaica, she is a first-generation African American. She uses human hair, but more often woven cotton string and thread, to confront issues of race.

In “Afro Abe,” Clark has framed seven $5 bills in a column, each embroidered with afros in black thread on Lincoln's portrait.

These grow larger and larger from bottom to top, until the topmost practically swallows the Great Emancipator's head.

The hairstyle, a badge of honor during the civil rights struggles of the '60s, is, as Clark puts it, “a symbol of black liberation.” So is Lincoln.

Just as Clark uses hair “as a measure of time” in a piece such as “Abacus” (an abacus with balls of her hair in place of the counting beads), “Afro Abe” collapses time, reminding us not only how far we have come but, more important, how far we have to go.

Plus, an afro on Abraham Lincoln is impossible to bypass. It draws attention, gets a viewer in to linger longer and think about the issues underlying Clark's art.

And it is not lost on Clark that we recently elected our first black president.

“In one sense, giving Lincoln an afro is an honorific,” says Clark, who understands that she probably would not be able to do what she does without the 16th president in our nation's historical record.

“But,” she adds, “Lincoln's decision to free the slaves was an economic decision as much as anything else.”

She plans on making 44 “Afro Abes” before the next presidential election, all of them slightly different, because Obama is the 44th president, and “both of these gentlemen had some pretty serious economic problems to deal with.”

“I almost consider ‘Afro Abe' as a kind of portrait of Obama,” she says.

Most of these works are interconnected, entwined as if woven together.

Lincoln is also on the penny; hence, “Penny Loafers,” a pair of shoes made out of copper one-cent coins. The penny, Clark says, is a reference to one of the earliest beads used in textiles, the cowrie shell, which some African cultures used as currency.

As for “Madam C.J. Walker,” the impressive tapestry made from the tools of her trade, its subject made a fortune in hair and beauty products in the early 1900s, when successful female African American entrepreneurs were as unheard of as black presidents.

“She was born after the Emancipation Proclamation, but for her to come out of the cotton fields of the South and enter the boardroom is astounding,” Clark says. “It was not only about money, but political power.”

Perhaps no other piece in the Clark exhibition expresses the historical and ongoing political quandary of African Americans like “Black Hair Flag.”

Clark forms an American flag using black cotton thread braided into cornrows (stripes) and Bantu knots (stars) over the Confederate stars and bars.

Not only does this place African Americans “within” the Confederacy that enslaved them, but, Clark notes, “There's the sense of using hair to stand in for Africans and people of African descent to indicate the part we played in making the America we're all proud of.”

Sonya Clark's solo exhibition remains on exhibit in the Southwest School of Art's Russell Hill Rogers Gallery, Navarro campus, through Feb. 12. Also on view is “Constant Churning,” an exhibition digital photocollages by the late San Antonio artist Marie Swartz. Call 224-1848 or visit www.swschool.org.